Re: [nodejs] node on IBM AIX POWER7

[Ben Noordhuis]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 6:56 PM, rgmilone <rgmi...@cnxcorp.com> wrote:
> Does anyone know if it's within the realm of feasibility to run node on
> IBM's AIX OS? This is IBM's UNIX OS running on IBM Power Systems hardware
> with POWER7 chip architecture. I can't find any references to anyone doing
> this so I'm thinking it might not work. I tried compiling the source and it
> blew up, but I'm not sure if it's something I'm doing wrong or if it's just
> simply that it will never work because of a fundamental incompatibility with
> IBM's hardware. Before I go any further does anyone know if I'm crazy for
> trying this or if it theoretically should compile?

POWER is not a supported architecture. You could compile an x86 build
and run that in an emulator but it won't be fast.

[rgmilone]

Thanks Ben, do you know if the incompatibility goes all the way down to google v8 or is the incompatibility is with nodejs itself?  I guess I'm wondering what the effort would be to make POWER a supported platform and what your feeling might be that compatibility may occur at some point in the near future.  I love nodejs but my company does mostly large scale enterprise apps on IBM Power Systems.

[Ben Noordhuis]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 7:27 PM, rgmilone <rgmi...@cnxcorp.com> wrote:
> Thanks Ben, do you know if the incompatibility goes all the way down to
> google v8 or is the incompatibility is with nodejs itself? I guess I'm
> wondering what the effort would be to make POWER a supported platform and
> what your feeling might be that compatibility may occur at some point in the
> near future. I love nodejs but my company does mostly large scale
> enterprise apps on IBM Power Systems.

Two things would need to be ported, V8 and libuv. Both are not trivial
and unlikely to happen. I conservatively estimate it at 3 to 6 man
months with perpetual maintenance afterwards - we simply don't have
the resources for that.

[rgmilone]

I finally got nodejs working on IBM POWER.  Thanks to Ben for the clue that I could try to run it in an x86 emulator.  Based on just some crude tests so far it seems blazing fast but I have to see how it performs under a real-world load before committing to any large scale app development.  If anyone is interested in nodejs on IBM POWER here's how I did it:

I carved out a logical partition on my IBM Power System and installed RedHat Linux 6.3 for POWER.  Then I installed the PowerVM lx86 emulation environment into that.  This is a layer that translates the x86 instruction set to POWER.  Once I got all that working I simply installed nodejs just like you would on a typical RedHat Linux box.

[Ben Noordhuis]

Interesting. You can use benchmark/http_simple_bench.sh as a crude
performance benchmark. I'd like to see the numbers if you don't mind
sharing them.

[Bruno Jouhier]

We are also interested by deploying node on IBM Power. So this is great news.

Would be even better to have a native port of node.js but this is probably something IBM should handle. If you want to lobby for this, I'll support you.

Thanks for investigating the emulation path.

Bruno

[Filippo Di Noto]

I work in a big Power/AIX environment. I was curious about using node and tried to compile it but didn't get to far. I'm a novice in these matters.

It did strike up an interesting conversation in the office about why it doesn't work. C is platform independent, so the source should compile. But obviously things are not that simple.

[Ben Noordhuis]

IBM released a node-on-POWER prototype recently:
https://github.com/andrewlow/node